Summary
Michael recalls when he and Francis were very young and their mother took them to the place she was born: an impoverished village in the middle of Trinidad called Ste. Madeleine. The air is thick with the scent of mud and dung and flowers. There are dirt roads and no street lights, and they brush their teeth from an outdoor cold tap.
After meeting cousins and aunts and uncles, they leave, their mother’s sister joining them for the car ride to the airport. She admits she envies how Ruth got away to have a perfect life in Canada. Ruth doesn’t admit that the boys’ father left years ago and that she never had the time or money to complete her nurse training. Like many mothers in the Park, Ruth works as hard as she can to raise children who have a little more opportunity than she did.
Michael recounts another time when he and Francis are young. After a long shift, their mother takes them to the mall to see a movie. They eat hot dogs in the food court afterward. Three white boys hassle them when an announcement comes over the PA for everyone to clear out of the food court because it needs to close for cleaning. The altercation results in Francis standing up for them, and Ruth intervening, only to be pushed by the white boys, one of whom she slaps. He insults her with a slur. When they leave, Ruth smooths out her clothes and says, “A couple punks, that’s all,” and tries to smile.
The day of the audition, after leaving his mother’s living room while Michael and Ruth are getting medical supplies, Francis walks to Desirea’s. Michael runs after him and catches up. Inside, Dru gets Francis in a chair and puts bandages on his wounded face. He says that Francis needs to go to the hospital and that his pupils aren’t pointing in the same direction. Francis sways and acts drunk. The cops show up soon in tactical gear. Someone has called about Francis needing medical attention. Dru explains that nothing happened, but the cops are on edge and suspicious when they see the state of Francis.
The police order everyone to line up against the wall and show ID. Francis refuses, demanding the police tell him what he’s done. He stumbles and tears up, demanding they tell him. Everyone tries to tell Francis to listen to them and do as the cops say, but he won’t. The cops un-holster their guns and tell Francis not to move. But he does when one of the cops grabs Jelly’s arm. Michael doesn’t hear the gunshot: he only sees his brother fall.
In Chapter Seven, it is early morning and Michael is in the emergency ward waiting area. A nurse tells him his mother hasn’t suffered anything more serious than a fractured femur. While in the hospital, Francis observes another emergency case: a boy fell when he and his brother were on the roof. Their mother is making phone calls to assure people her son is okay. Michael comments that there will be no “complicated grief” for them.
Michael goes back in his memory to Francis’s funeral. Everyone is there in borrowed suits too big or too small. Everyone except Jelly, who screamed and struggled after Francis was shot, and so was charged with resisting arrest and still hasn’t posted bail by the funeral date. There is a man in a tan suit sitting at the back of the church. He nods when he notices Michael staring at him, trying to place him. The man is gone by the time the funeral rites are over. That evening they return home and Michael insists that Ruth eat something. She has some crackers and then sets to cleaning a pan with vigor. Michael goes out for a walk, returning to find neighbors crowded outside with looks of concern. Inside, Ruth has emptied all the drawers and cupboards and moved the furniture and is hammering at the floor, complaining of the mess she has created.
From this point on, Michael’s life becomes dedicated to looking after his mother. Because he is under eighteen, she accompanies him to the police interviews about the shooting, which involve questions such as: “Would you agree that Francis had a bit of a reputation? Did he sometimes exhibit unpredictable moods? Would you agree, Michael, that your brother possessed a history of violence?” Aisha, who Michael tries to refuse to talk to following the shooting, pushes her way into the house with food. She makes Michael walk with her to the library so he can tell her what really happened with Francis. Michael explains how Francis saw a cop with an un-holstered weapon grab Jelly. Francis had reached to “still the weapon,” a “gesture with history.” The police concluded that the shooting was lawful.
Michael comments that people flee in different ways. Following Francis’s death, his friends disperse into the city and Dru closes Desirea’s. Aisha flees to university in Montreal. Michael lives his life, running into the old crew occasionally. One day at the library, nearly a decade later, he sits across from Samuel, Aisha’s father, who says he’s wanted to talk to Michael for some time. Samuel reveals that he and Francis used to listen to old records together sometimes. An odd connection, given who they both were, but it was a meaningful friendship to Samuel. Without telling his daughter, Samuel then moves into a hospice and lives out his last days. Then Aisha calls Michael because she is coming to town for the funeral. Michael invites her to stay with him and visit the Park.
Michael goes into his mother’s hospital room, having learned that a high blood-alcohol level was detected by the staff. Ruth says firmly that it is a new day. As they are being discharged, Michael and Ruth see Aisha and Jelly waiting with a small bunch of flowers by the hospital exit. The four return to Ruth’s home. Jelly makes a feast of delicious food and they listen to music. Michael comments that “we are here and for the moment together.” Aisha presses the idea of borrowing a wheelchair and going down to the creek in the Rouge. Jelly puts on a new record. A low voice cuts the silence and Ruth frowns slightly, as if in pain. When Jelly sees, he fumbles to lower the volume. However, Ruth shakes her head and gestures for Jelly to raise it.
Analysis
While his mother spends the night in the hospital, Michael thinks back to the time he and Francis went with her to Ste. Madeleine, the inland Trinidadian village of her birth. While they live in an impoverished area of Scarborough, the boys are unprepared for the extreme poverty—represented in the lack of creature comforts like indoor plumbing and hot water—of the village their mother is from. In an instance of dramatic irony, Ruth conceals from her sister during this trip the true nature of her life in Canada. Preferring to let her sister believe she is living her dream, Ruth conceals the shame of having been left by her husband and having given up on her career.
Michael next remembers another instance of his mother attempting to preserve her dignity. While at the mall with her sons, she was the victim of a racist assault and abuse from white boys. Rather than show her fear or let on that her pride has been injured, Ruth dismissed the assailants as “punks” and smiles through the indignity of having been roughed up in front of her young sons, who were helpless to step in themselves at that age. With these recollections, Chariandy depicts how Ruth has maintained her dignity in trying circumstances; at the same time, she reveals a tendency to repress and deny difficult emotions—a survival mechanism Michael inherits.
Returning to his memory of the day Francis was beaten up by the bouncers, Michael comments on how Francis flees their house and seeks refuge at Desirea’s. Dru attends to Francis’s injuries, noticing that his pupils aren’t pointed in the same direction—a potential sign that Francis has a brain injury. While Francis refuses to see a doctor, someone calls for an ambulance. The 911 operator confuses the situation and police show up instead. They are on high alert, having taken the call for help to be a call to respond to active violence, even though the fight took place earlier and at another location.
The theme of discrimination arises as the police order the occupants of the barbershop to show their ID and line up to be searched. In his concussed state, Francis is less careful around the police than he might otherwise be. When he sees someone manhandle Jelly, he reaches to intervene, making it appear as if he is trying to take a cop’s weapon. This prompts the already tense police to open fire and kill Francis on the spot. Michael then recounts the funeral, in which a man he vaguely recognizes—most likely his and Francis’s father—appears briefly in the back of the church. That very night, Ruth’s grief-induced mental illness begins, and she starts acting erratically and nonsensically, hammering the floor of their home.
Michael also recalls how the police asked leading questions to make it seem as though Francis had a reputation for belligerence and was therefore deserving of the suspicion that led to him being shot. While Michael and everyone who knew Francis understood that he reached out to stop the police because he wanted to protect Jelly, just as he once held the blade brandished at Michael, the police rule his killing “lawful,” as to them he was simply a young Black man prone to violence who appeared to try to take an officer’s weapon.
Having finally addressed in his narration the traumatic event behind the “loss” of his older brother, Michael collects his mother from her hospital room. As though she too has undergone an emotional transformation, Ruth declares that it is a new day. Although he told them to leave him and Ruth alone, Michael is not displeased to find Aisha and Jelly waiting with the same type of blue flowers Ruth was found picking in the Rouge Valley. Ending the book on a more optimistic note, Chariandy depicts Michael and Ruth living in the moment with Aisha and Jelly, all of them enjoying each other’s company and making plans to get to the Rouge Valley. Just as the group is coming out of the darkest part of their grief over Francis’s death, the valley is experiencing spring’s renewal—a symbol of better times to come as they finally emerge from denial and come to accept Francis’s death.
